The Newlyweds: The Bride Who Fell to Earth

A young novelist spins a high-flying tale out of an inspiring encounter in the air

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When we leave home, our self-knowledge and life goals are often thrown into disarray. For dutiful, driven only-child ­Amina, the woman at the heart of Nell Freud­en­berger's densely beautiful ­novel The Newlyweds (Knopf), advancing the plan that seemed most favor­able to her family—bringing her parents out of Bangladesh to ­America after ­gaining citizenship here herself—is initially gratifying. Settling into suburban Rochester, New York, with her new American husband, George, the solid and seemingly sympathetic ­engineer she met on the Inter­net, Amina marvels at mailboxes, snow, and the local supermarket. She takes part-time ­service work and English classes and is ­kindly if somewhat stiffly ­embraced by her in-laws. But when ­Amina learns that George is not so eager to install her parents in their three-bedroom split-level—and also has a more complicated romantic history than he had let on—her shame is searing.

By the time Amina returns to Bangladesh to fetch her parents, we don't know whether she will go back to George or pursue Nasir, her father's best friend's handsome, worldly son, for whom she finds she feels intense sexual desire. Even more stirring than this tension is Amina's growing understanding that ­moving forward often involves losing one's grip. Freudenberger, a deliciously precise and perceptive writer, loosely based Amina on a woman she met on an airplane, and when she describes Amina's recognition "that the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together" is largely an illusion because we're all "many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you," we can only be glad they struck up what must have been a helluva conversation.